Despite all the difficulties caused by the Russian military aggression, Astarta prepared all inputs for the spring planting season and completed the full range of field works on its entire land bank within the optimal time.
“We are convinced that we should not reduce agricultural production during the war, on the contrary, its current scale must be preserved,” Vadym Skrypnyk, the Director for Agricultural Production and Storage, Astarta, said. “All available land bank must be cultivated. Therefore, Astarta uses 100 percent of the land it operates and, after demining, planted even on those lands in the Chernihiv region, which were under temporary occupation until early April.”
This year's final acreage is the following: sugarbeets (33kha), corn (38kha), soybeans (40kha), winter wheat (55kha), sunflowers (30kha), winter rapeseeds (6kha), organic crops (2kha) and fodder crops (8kha).
“There have been some changes in this year's crop structure,” Skrypnyk said. “We have reduced the area under corn in favour of oilseeds such as sunflower and soybeans. They have a lower yield per hectare than corn, but they can be processed locally in Ukraine.”
Currently, the main tasks of the Astarta’s team are to harvest on its entire land bank and ensure the storage and processing of the crops.
Astarta produced 266,000 tonnes of white sugar from its 2021 harvest, processing 1.8 million tonnes of sugarbeet.
That compares to 2020 when it harvested about 1.5 million tonnes of sugarbeet and refined 226,000 tonnes of white sugar for a market share of 22 percent.